


The Happiness Thief

by changdictator



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Comedy, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Punk ChanKaiSoo
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-22
Updated: 2015-11-22
Packaged: 2018-05-02 22:48:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5266763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/changdictator/pseuds/changdictator
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is not a story about Do Kyungsoo or Kim Jongin. This is not a story about friendship, courage, or growing up. Actually, this is more a long-winded complaint regarding a flamingly obnoxious asshole, whose redacted initials begin with P and end in CY, than any sort of story. But it's not like there exists a better way to remember him, so here goes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Happiness Thief

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was written by Lin, Nomie, Snail-kun, and tlist, who chipped in 918k words of thoughtful commentary while I fainted, got up, and fainted again. Also: IT TOOK TWO YEARS BUT I FINALLY HAVE 1/4 OF YOUR EFS, RAN. I would prostrate myself in rigorous self-abnegating apology if I weren't, in fact, freshly fainted.

"Did Chanyeol say he’s going to give you a ride?” Kyungsoo’s mom asks, glancing back through the rear view mirror. Beside her, his dad turns off the transmission and remains silent. The Incheon sky overhead the station’s back parking lot is a saturated steel blue, clouded by the steam from a food cart beside them.

 

 “Yeah, I’m thanking him right now,” says Kyungsoo, as he replies to Chanyeol’s _“I’ll wait for you by the entrance!! :D :D Wait in the parking lot!!!!”_  with a grammatically impeccable, _“Be late and I’ll finish you.”_

 

“Isn’t he the cutest thing,” His mom gushes, twisting around to pick an invisible lint ball off Kyungsoo’s sweater. Not the most discerning statement. The Chanyeol who shared his sandbox couldn’t reach cute with nine lives and a fifty-point start-up bonus. Word to the wise: no one on a strict diet of soda and boogers could. If anything, Chanyeol has probably grown into a shut-in hosting aggravated social anxiety, ten different glasses cords, and a sea of anime fetishes.

  

His dad turns too, reaching past the seats to tuck a bill into his messenger bag. He claps Kyungsoo on the shoulder. “Here. Buy your friend some oranges or something. He likes oranges, right?”

 

“Sure, oranges,” Kyungsoo says, already shuffling out of the car, the bag a deadweight swinging him back. His Dad probably doesn’t need to know that oranges won’t be necessary. Chanyeol has already asked Kyungsoo to import a dozen JAVs in said bag. Which, by the way, will be seeing a purifying fire bath first thing off the bus. 

 

Dad pokes his head out the car, watching Kyungsoo waddle away. “And tell Chanyeol’s pops I said hi.”

 

Kyungsoo is too busy fighting the crippled roller wheel on his luggage and keeping his bag from spilling its guilty guts to respond. 

 

“And call us when you get to your aunt’s,” his mom yells behind him.

 

“Yes Mom,” Kyungsoo echoes back, already lost in the crowd, lugging along his broken luggage and porn bag and a phone endlessly abuzz with Chanyeol’s live weather forecasts and fashion guides and underwear horoscopes. By the time he catches his breath again, his parents are gone.

 

A pang of loneliness reels him back. But so does the mitosing mess on his hands, because by the time he gets onto the bus, he has not only the trunk and the porn and the phone, but also mandarins, potato chips and a migraine hammering into his temple, all of which is adding onto an increasingly unsurmountable desire to hurt Chanyeol.

 

“ _Are you having a good trip??!! Did you bring the videos?? :D :D_ ” comes Chanyeol’s text, two minutes into the ride.

 

Kyungsoo, gathering every ounce of restraint he can muster, responds “ _Die_ ,” and turns his phone off.

 

In retrospect, he should have kept his phone on, because when the bus stops in Seoul, there is no Chanyeol. In fact, ten minutes later, long after the congestion has dissipated, there is still no genetically predispositioned elf-ears or glasses cords waiting by the station. There is only Do Kyungsoo, struggling to push open the entrance doors like an utter shithead, clutching a box of mandarins and popping his eyes out at a motorcycle that had zipped, apparently, straight out of a Mad Max flick.

 

But actually, Kyungsoo thinks, this is a non-issue. Even if the cyclist weren’t wearing a helmet with his shield down, Kyungsoo already knows that this bike has nothing to do with him--or Chanyeol, for that matter, who struggles to ride a bicycle with all four training wheels and a personal assistant steadying his trajectory. In fact, Chanyeol is probably stuck in traffic somewhere with his dad, in an ugly fourth-hand family Hyundai.

 

“Hey, Brah!” a Morgan Freeman voice calls out from behind the face shield. The bike circles Kyungsoo, leaning into a smooth turn millimeters before Kyungsoo’s feet. “Why didn’t you wait by the parking lot?”

 

Well fuck him sideways, it _is_ Chanyeol.

 

Kyungsoo drops his mandarins. Also his jaw.

 

As he struggles to work his jaw up, which takes a distressingly long time, Chanyeol kicks down the stand, swings a leg off the side of his bike, and holy fucking shi—

 

Chanyeol is like twenty and a half meters tall.

 

This time, Kyungsoo has to physically shove his jaw back up with both hands.

 

“Did you shrink?” Chanyeol asks, punching Kyungsoo gamely on the shoulder as he plucks his helmet off.

 

“Oh,” is the only thing that stumbles out of Kyungsoo’s mouth while he watches Chanyeol shake his hair out _à la_ Pantene.

 

Apparently puberty has given Chanyeol a tattoo over his collarbone, technicolor silver hair, and biceps cropped off the cover of Men’s Fitness. Kyungsoo doesn’t even bother holding his jaw up anymore. There’s no point. For all he knows, Chanyeol might as well have sprouted a vagina.

 

And when Chanyeol says, casually plopping his helmet over Kyungsoo’s head, “Hope you’re a speed junkie,” Kyungsoo only wishes Chanyeol could’ve grown a vagina instead.

 

“What?” asks Kyungsoo, narrow-eyed and slack-jawed. Chanyeol’s words are kind of ping-ponging off his face. A third of him still refuses to accept that this is Chanyeol. The other third of him is playing mental hooky and expecting Chanyeol’s dad to pull up with a beaten-up passenger car that smells of leather and lint. The remaining third, the only third that has bothered registering anything anymore, translates Chanyeol’s words, considers those words, and decides that it shall quit life.

 

Chanyeol ignores him. “You’ll have to hold on tight, since this is my third—no, second—time riding this.” He does a haphazard wave with both arms. “This _watchamacallit_.”

 

Kyungsoo’s stomach twists into a nasty knot, akin to that thing you get the moment you hit the top of a creaky rollercoaster ride. Except ten times worse. Then quadrupled. “What?”

 

“Don’t worry though, I’m getting my license next year.” Chanyeol beams, ignoring him harder. He flips Kyungsoo’s face shield down with a tap of the knuckle, smile shaded soft violet behind the plastic. “Swing your leg over before you step on the footpegs, okay?”

 

“What?” Kyungsoo parrots with all the brilliant wit of a dung-beetle.

 

“By the way, have I told you that your skin has never looked smoother?” Chanyeol notes.

 

“What? Why?”

 

“Nothing, just softening the blow.”

 

“What blow?”

 

“PARK CHANYEOL, YOU ARE A DEAD PIECE OF SHIT,” is the apparent blow, a clap of thunder booming across the station.

 

Kyungsoo peers over his shoulder, clinging futilely onto his messenger bag and all the D-cup boobs in East Asia as a last symbol of hope.

 

“…yeol,” Kyungsoo squeaks, in a conflicted quarter squat characteristic of the two-time world champion of dumbassery, at the mob swarming five meters away. “Those are your friends, right?”

 

Spearheading the mob is a boy with a shock of unswept blonde hair and a friendly smile. If friendly smiles are meant to look endlessly malicious, that is. Like Chanyeol, he wears his blazer unbuttoned, sleeves pushed up behind the elbows. There are flecks of what Kyungsoo hopes to be paint smattered up his forearm. A scar runs down his neck, fresh and dripping with—paint—Kyungsoo thinks. Hopes. Prays.

 

“Sure, we’re friends.” Chanyeol shrugs, all fucks to the wind as he winks at Kyungsoo. “Like how Cain and Abel were friends.” A pensive pause. “Hang on, did Cain kill Abel? Or was that Moses?”

  

 

 

 

 

+++

 

 

 

Whatever evil deed Kim Jongin committed in his past life must have been on par with murder or grand theft for him to deserve a frenemy in Park Chanyeol comparable to a bout of extremely explosive diarrhea. Each time Jongin begins thinking Chanyeol can’t possibly exacerbate things, Chanyeol proves himself as the gift that never stops shitting shit shittily.

 

“Give me my bike back,” Jongin demands, wiping blood off his neck as he closes the distance to Chanyeol. He can feel blisters forming where his hand grips the metal bar. For a moment Jongin is overcome with shame at his appearance, acutely aware of the attention from the crowd mushrooming around them. This wasn’t how his six-year old self planned to grow up. Jongin’s only ever wanted to be—was only ever invested in—being a dancer.

 

Chanyeol stops sending love waves to his midget friend to blink blankly at Jongin. “Then whose bike am I supposed to ride?”

 

How he ended up at this exact point in the space-time continuum, with blonde hair and a band-aid on his nose, heading the largest school gang in the district, is purely thanks to the primal shittability Chanyeol is currently displaying. Canon Jongin was but another freshman who spent more time sleeping at school than studying. Then Park Chanyeol and hair bleach happened. And now, half the sophomore class is buying his bread and carrying his backpack and asking whether Big Brother wants to kill Chanyeol, because “We’ll slit his fucking throat for you, Big Brother, just let us know when.”

 

Not exactly the curveball alternative universe dream of every dance prodigy, no.

 

Jongin ignores the crowd and squares his gaze on Chanyeol, who has returned to making small-talk with his bite-sized pal. Up close, the little guy looks nothing like the crowd Chanyeol typically hangs out with. Tiny shoulders, big eyes—a life-sized, cherub-faced plush toy next to Chanyeol’s death metal eyeliner and acid silver hair. Then again, Jongin isn’t sure what people six-feet of concentrated evil would befriend. Sadako? Stalin? Satan?

 

Satan is reasonable, it turns out. He tells Chanyeol, “Give him his motorcycle back, you asshat. Besides, he looks like he needs to go to the hospital.”

 

Jongin takes the opportunity to add, “I’m not warning you again.”

 

Chanyeol thinks about it for a contemplative second, then decides, “I can. But I don’t wanna.”

 

The sheer absurdity of this statement body slams Jongin into apoplexy for a moment. “LISTEN HERE, FERRET CLUB.”

 

Ever unfazed, Chanyeol helps Satan climb onto Jongin’s bike and settles down himself before cutting Jongin off. “Oh right. This is my best friend, Kyungsoo.” He turns to Satan, who is busy looking like Chanyeol just served him a dead cat for afternoon tea. “Kyungsoo, this is a puppy. I think he’d like an orange.”

 

“It’s a mandarin,” Jongin hears Satan say, but Chanyeol snatches the fruit from the ground anyway. A blink later, the mandarin tears punctually past his ear and sends the guy behind him stumbling backwards into a fall. What kind of fucking killer mandarins does Chanyeol even hang out with, fuck.

 

“See you around, puppy!” Chanyeol hoots, and revs the bike engine.

 

Sighing, Jongin shoves his bangs out of his face and swings his metal bar back. Obviously talking isn’t going to solve this. The bar slices through the air like the crack of a whip, but makes no impact--which would be because Chanyeol has long gone. All that's left is the roar of the engine echoing past a dust bomb suspended alight in the sun.

 

A beat later, Jongin bashes his bar into the ground, snapping at the rabbit-eared and ever terrified crowd behind him, “What, are you waiting for him to come back and toss you a fucking bone?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

+++

 

 

 

 

“They’re rumors, that’s it,” Chanyeol says, proffering Kyungsoo his bag of potato chips as he sucks a finger clean. Kyungsoo shakes his head and watches Chanyeol struggle to make heads out of the situation. “I mean, it’s not physically possible for anyone to take down an entire school in one night—”

 

Without further ado, Kyungsoo shows Chanyeol the forum thread he has pulled up on his phone titled, “ _WHISOON’S EMPEROR FROM HELL: PARK CHANYEOL_.”

 

Chanyeol spares it a glance, then gesticulates rather theatrically. “Oh, that. Yeah, it was only a phase or—hey, feel like pizza?”

 

Kyungsoo squints. It’s been a week, but he still can’t put a finger on exactly what went wrong with the ten-year old Park Chanyeol who cried into his seaweed soup while watching Princess Diaries and insisted babies were delivered by doves after god saw a mom and a dad holding hands. In six years, Chanyeol has by some extraordinary act of his dove-whisperer god managed to evolve into someone who would crash through a fish market at a hundred kilometers an hour with three dozen pierced, tattooed, slicked up, torn down delinquents on his tail.

 

This Chanyeol is all-metal, a copper plate in his backpack, a switch-blade taped inconspicuously under the lid of his pencil case, and a stainless-steel piercing through his lower lip. This Chanyeol gets wasted dancing at clubs you’d see in 19+ movies and extorts lunch money not because he needs it, but because he gets a kick out of watching people beg. It barely seems like Chanyeol could be real, double-exposed over a blood-stained linoleum floor and the back of a homely classroom.

 

“No, not really,” Kyungsoo yanks the conversation back on track, furtive as it is by this point. “Why does everyone evacuate the room during lunch? Why does the teacher apologize for saying your name during roll-call? Why is your hair silver? Why are you not answering me?”

 

“Hold up,” Chanyeol says, craning his head out the window to yell at someone at the entrance. “Hey, two small pizzas, one with extra cheese and one ham and pineapple, got it?”

 

A garbled shout returns. Exactly ten minutes later, Kyungsoo is grilling Chanyeol in the presence of two steaming pizzas. By this point, even his question marks have question marks attached to their question marks, which come with a side of complementary question marks.

 

“Didn’t you like your pizza with ham?” Chanyeol asks, chewing through a mouthful of cheese and tomato paste and coke, “Because if not, we can get another one.”

 

More than going wrong, it’s like Park Chanyeol had uprooted himself and outsourced his personality from network television. Kyungsoo studies the Chanyeol sitting before him, bright and personable, and the blurred headshot on the screen of his phone, vicious, cold like the edge of a katana, contemplating if they’re the two faces of the same coin, or if one is a mask over the other.

 

“They’re saying you annihilated the upper years on your first day of school,” Kyungsoo reads. “Are you human?”

 

“I should’ve gotten some hot sauce too—”

 

“How did you even—is that a tattoo on your collarbone?”

 

“The cheese is kinda rubbery though, frankly.”

 

“Chanyeol,” Kyungsoo shouts, smacking the pizza out of Chanyeol’s hand. It plops down cheese-first into the box. “Stop. Talking. About. Pizza.”

 

“Okay, fine, you got it.” Chanyeol shrugs, wipes his hands off with a napkin. He manages to meet Kyungsoo’s gaze for two seconds before bursting into a fit of hysterical laughter, “You should see your own face, Brah. You’re the best, seriously. I fucking love you to death.”

 

Kyungsoo rolls his eyes until he sees stars, “What are you on about now?”

 

“Nothing, just softening the blow.”

 

Kyungsoo is almost afraid to ask, “What blow?”

 

Because, of course, Chanyeol answers with, “I’m kind of in the middle of, what’s the right word for this—seizing?—the city. Don’t worry though, there’s only like, three schools left. No biggie.”

 

And the conversation conveniently whimpers into a slow death.

 

Quietly exasperated, Kyungsoo decides, “I should probably stop hanging out with you. My dad didn’t buy me life insurance.”

 

“I would never hurt you,” Chanyeol, deceptively fresh, lies straight through his teeth. “Oh, but Jongin might. He’s kinda crazy.”

 

Kyungsoo stink eyes him. “You’re a hundred years too early to call anyone crazy, shithead.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

+++

 

 

 

It’s beginning to rain, droplets sailing out of a sunny sky, but Jongin’s been expecting it. He reaches his hand out. The water rolls into the creases of his palm. The horizon is pixelated with a wide stretch of rooftops before him, some melding into an ocean of grey, some violet with sun.

 

“Here for the view?” He starts, speaking to no one in particular.

 

Two steps behind him, the boy shifts his weight onto a creaky part of the rusty iron flooring. “No, not really.”

 

Jongin laughs, loudly enough to surprise even himself, as he turns to meet Kyungsoo’s eyes. Kyungsoo has been following him for most of the day, surreptitiously camouflaging himself behind textbooks and decorative plants whenever Jongin tried to ask.

 

Obviously, as dozens of girls and the occasional guy before him were, Kyungsoo is here to confess his love. That Jongin was hot stuff wasn’t exactly confidential material one had to be made privy to.

 

“So what are you here for?”

 

Kyungsoo takes a second to contemplate the question. He’s got this boyish charm to him, Jongin decides. If someone paid him enough, he might consider fucking him. Or actually, he might even do it for free.

 

Except Kyungsoo is not here to confess his undying love. “Chanyeol was getting annoying with his whining,” he says, voice low and nonchalant, not the kind you’d expect from someone who plays Park Chanyeol like a snake charmer.

 

“That’s a pretty shitty thing to say, for a friend,” Jongin says.

 

Kyungsoo admits without much hesitation, “I’m a pretty shitty person in general.”

 

Jongin snorts. “And here I was beginning to think we could get along.”

 

“You have shitty taste, then.”

 

“At least I know better than to befriend Chanyeol,” Jongin says, reaching into a stretch before he stands and begins dusting off his trousers. He has to meet Jongdae at the billiards joint, then catch the first bus to Gangnam to help Junmyeon comb out unruly freshmen. There’s a lot of strategic networking and chessboard geopolitics involved in running half a school. Jongin has only made it this far and this quickly because he’d realized this on the first punch he landed.

 

How Park Assyeol managed to dominate every other school in the city on his own, though, god knows. The guy is a cataclysmic botch-up of an egomaniac, who would sooner bite his tongue and die than submit to anything including but not limited to god, nature, or morality. Anyone who knew him despised him. And everyone knew him.

 

Excluding Kyungsoo.

 

“Chanyeol’s not so bad,” Kyungsoo insists, tossing Jongin something that he’s dug out of his pocket. “He’s giving you your bike back.”

 

Jongin makes out the shape of his plastic-covered house keys and the old Toyota logo on one of the tags mid-air and, out of sheer shock, fails to catch it. Or to move his arms at all. So the keys kind of, do the thing where they bounce off his forehead. And land smack at his feet.

 

For the six years he’s known Chanyeol, of all the hundreds of things Chanyeol’s lifted out of his pocket, this is the first time something’s actually came back voluntarily and in one piece. Jongin mutters as he bends to pick the keys up from the ground, “What, did Park Chanyeol hit his head on the ceiling or something?”

 

“Nah,” he hears Kyungsoo say, measured, dry, and sober. “He hit his head on my knuckles.”

 

When Jongin looks up again, Kyungsoo is already halfway out the door, swallowed in the darkness of the stairwell. As he turns back, the sun burns into his face, stirring melted amber into his eyes. He looks--different. There is the slightest grin tugging up one corner of his lips, almost indiscernible in the darkness. Jongin’s breath stops for a second, like Kyungsoo’s dropkicked the air out of him. Even though his mouth is open and forming the shape of a very proper “thank you”, he doesn’t manage a single audible sound.

 

Well, that’s new. 

 

 

 

 

+++

 

 

 

 

 

“Hey Brah,” Chanyeol begins, eyes twinkling impishly, as soon as the lunch bell rings.

 

“What do you want,” Kyungsoo responds, half-hoping “Brah” isn’t a thing Chanyeol is trying to push if he ignores it hard enough. It took him two weeks to finally accept Chanyeol’s miraculous--growth spurt, as his mom described it over Skype--only it turns out there’s much more wrong with Chanyeol than tattoos and a newfound predilection for violence.  It’s on a deeper level. On a very obnoxious level. A level to which Kyungsoo will never learn to adapt.

 

Jongin was right. Kyungsoo should’ve known better than to befriend Chanyeol.

 

“What are you doing tonight,” Chanyeol tries again, perking up, “Brah?”

 

Kyungsoo can feel the vein in his temple twitching. “Unpacking. Also, don’t call me that.”

 

“Cool,” Chanyeol nods, mouthing, “Brah.”

 

Mustering all the determination in the world, Kyungsoo peels his eyes off Chanyeol’s uneven smile and concentrates on making out the next line of his biology textbook. One word at a time. Eukaryotic. Cells. Do. Not. Have--

 

“Brah,” Chanyeol coos again after a moment, a song-bird in the spring of paradise, sliding his face right over the diagram of a eukaryotic organelle. “Wanna take over Kyunggi High together?”

 

“No.”

 

“But Brah,” Chanyeol hums.

 

Wordlessly, Kyungsoo slides a bookmark into the crevice between the pages, shuts the book with one hand, and proceeds to slam it into Chanyeol’s nose. Chanyeol jerks away, barely grazing the spine of the book, and runs face-first into Kyungsoo’s open palm. Kicking the chair out from beneath him, Kyungsoo shoves Chanyeol against the desk behind them in one swoop. He’s tall, but he’s also scrawny and unbalanced. Kyungsoo’s got him on his back in a blink.

 

Holding Chanyeol up by the collar, Kyungsoo says, “Try calling me Brah one more time, I dare--”

 

“Sorry. If it bothers you that much, I won’t anymore,” Chanyeol whispers, “...Brah.”

 

And cranes up to sneak a peck on Kyungsoo’s forehead.

 

Kyungsoo jerks back, absolutely--lips--Chanyeol’s—what—

 

Seven meters away, Chanyeol is screaming “DO KYUNGSOO MY BRAAAAHHHH” at the top of his lungs as he sprints down the hallway, arms waving like a plastic tube dancer, a wink of platinum shooting into the distance.

 

 

 

 

+++

 

 

 

 

Not that Jongin was counting, but it’s exactly four hundred and twenty seven hours before Kyungsoo visits him again. Or maybe Kyungsoo isn’t visiting him. Maybe Kyungsoo just missed the view. But it’s common knowledge at Whisoon that no one is allowed on the rooftop except Jongin and prospective suicide candidates. Then again, Kyungsoo is the only guy in Seoul who can send Chanyeol flying like a sock puppet. He’s probably exempt from common knowledge.

 

Which, Jongin decides, puts into question whether Kyungsoo is here to visit him or the unspectacular view of the block.

 

“If Chanyeol stops taking your things, will you consider a truce?” is the first thing that comes out of Kyungsoo’s mouth.

 

So he’s here for Chanyeol. Again.

 

Jongin tries to ball up the disappointment and eat it. Doesn’t work. He’s not used to people glossing over him. Between the blonde hair and the bad boy charm, people largely fail to neglect his existence. “Why?”

 

“He’s picking a fight with Kyunggi High’s Kim Junmyeon. Grapevine says the two of you are close, you and Junmyeon,” Kyungsoo says, studying his nails. Jongin tries to figure out why there is this overwhelming urge to hug Kyungsoo to death mounting inside him. Or perhaps that’s Kyungsoo’s weapon, the evolutionary edge he’s developed, akin to the domestic housecat. Kyungsoo’s short, with little pug legs that can’t drop kick anything taller than a sixth-grader in a growth stunt. He obviously can’t fight. And even if he could fight, Jongin has six years of empirical evidence proving Chanyeol doesn’t submit to strength, pain, or menace.

 

It has to be, Jongin figures, the cute. The Demonic Cute.

 

Jongin hides all these feelings beneath a cold glower. Or, as Sehun calls it, the glare of a severely constipated uncle.

 

“Chanyeol’s suicidal scheme to dominate the city, is none of my business,” Jongin shrugs, trying for nonchalance. “Besides, Junmyeon and I aren’t that close. If you want me to talk Junmyeon out of--”

 

“Chanyeol is ten times a better friend than Junmyeon,” Kyungsoo says, glancing at Jongin for a reaction. Jongin plays up the irritated scowl. “All right. Fine. So he’s a little noisy. And dumb. And obnoxious. And he has the brains of a parboiled starfish. But he can be nice, OK? And he’s sorry about the bike.”

 

Jongin jerks his head away and pretends that he wasn’t staring holes into Kyungsoo’s cheeks the entire time. “Chanyeol wouldn’t be sorry about the bike over his own dead body.”

 

“Fine, so _I’m_ sorry about the bike. But Chanyeol is still an all-around decent guy sometimes. Honest.”

 

“That’s mighty generous coming from someone who shoved him down two flights of stairs, what, last week?”

 

“I didn’t say _I_ was decent,” Kyungsoo sighs, frustrated. Jongin can see why Chanyeol likes teasing him. Kyungsoo has this… quality. It makes you want to make him step on you. Step on in a platonic sense. Of course. Because Jongin is all about the platonic stepping on. “Will you pull your head out of your disaffected ass and help that shithead or not?”

 

In a hundred parallel universes, with a hundred alternative Jongins, all of them would pummel anyone who spoke of his ass to a bloody death.

 

But Jongin doesn’t, because he’s busy trying not to laugh, and because his mouth is dry, his knees weak, his hands sweaty and cold and he can barely think straight with Kyungsoo looking him square in the eyes, like a wrong end of a barrel staring down his throat.

 

“Firstly, my ass is not disaffected. Secondly,” he blurts, like an absolute idiot, “I’ll think about it.”

 

 

 

 

+++

 

 

 

 

 

Kyungsoo’s premature death begins with the stark edge of a concrete building, a limp flyer blowing aimlessly through the street, and an indefinite, grey ceiling of a night sky behind him. Kyungsoo slumps back into the streetlamp, defeated. The “no big deal” Chanyeol had referred to turns out to be a colony of grossly offended punks equipped with everything from switchblades to baseball bats.

 

It wouldn’t be so bad, if, say, Chanyeol actually had one person on his side aside from Kyungsoo.

 

“If we’re going to go out,” Chanyeol says, glowing, “We might as well go out like a supernova, you know? Bang!”

 

“I’d prefer not to go out at all,” Kyungsoo says, with all the true enthusiasm of a man with a noose and potato sack over his head. “You can go and bang all you want on your own.”

 

Eight months ago, when Chanyeol called him saying, _“it’s a little lonely here by myself,”_ Kyungsoo had been worried that Chanyeol was being bullied at school for being noisy and creepy and too much himself. He had applied to Whisoon and studied past nosebleeds and fainting spells for the entrance exam because he thought Chanyeol had been crying his dumb elf ears and big frog eyes to sleep. And he couldn’t let Chanyeol cry alone. Kyungsoo wasn’t that kind of person.

 

Except now he wishes he were, because at least then he wouldn’t be preparing to have his ass overnighted to the Buyeo dynasty.

 

“Are you ready?” Chanyeol asks, a blazing grin stretched over his cheeks.

 

“No,” Kyungsoo says, but he flanks Chanyeol like a shadow anyway, right into the most uphill battle in the history of mankind, because here is where things stand: as much as Chanyeol is the sort of dickhead who would try to challenge an entire city on his own, Kyungsoo is definitely the kind of dickhead who would help him. So at the last possible minute, factoring in all the potential outcomes, Kyungsoo proffers a gesture of reconciliation. Apology, by Kyungsoo’s books, is the best policy.

 

“We are sincerely sorry to inconvenience you! Chanyeol and I will be heading home now,” he says, jerking Chanyeol’s flying kick down into a ninety-degree bow with his hand around the crown of Chanyeol’s head.

 

“VERY SORRY!” Chanyeol shouts, throwing something up before them.

 

Junmyeon’s expression softens, very quickly, into one of near visceral fury. And that is when Kyungsoo realizes the object Chanyeol pulled out was in fact a middle finger. A metal-clad, highly jubilant middle finger, connected to Chanyeol’s metal-clad hand, connected in turn to Chanyeol’s arm and torso, both shaking with laughter.

 

Oh, the joys of having an enormously, flamingly unconscionable asshole for a best friend.

 

Standing on the opposite courtyard, Junmyeon waves an extremely incensed finger in Chanyeol’s general direction and in a blink the hornet’s nest is upon them, buzzing with the kinds of profanity you only hear in 90s gangster flicks.

 

As Kyungsoo expected, it’s technically unfeasible to take on an entire school as Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum. Even factoring in Chanyeol’s impossibly acute reflexes and robotic stamina, the disadvantage is still simply statistical. Not fifteen minutes into the fight, Kyungsoo’s already lost feeling in both legs and is barely conscious enough to stand straight. The taste of iron is heavy over his tongue. With the blood welling up in his left eye, everything comes in shades of red and pink. Beside him, Chanyeol’s faring marginally better. There’s a gash over his arm dripping blood off his elbow and a nasty cut over his lower lip.

 

When the nth person takes an uppercut at his jaw, Kyungsoo already has his eyes closed, ready to drop into unconsciousness. Thing is, nothing meets his jaw. In fact, for two whole seconds, nothing happens at all.

 

 

 

 

 

+++

 

 

 

So, backtrack.

 

Approximately an hour earlier, Sehun demanded, “All right, OK. What’s wrong with you now,” sparing Jongin an unabashedly judgemental glare as he flipped through the television channels in the back of his dad’s dingy diner.

 

“Oh, nothing important,” Jongin mumbled, picking at this finger, then at the napkin beneath his finger, then at the table beneath the napkin, “I… you know. Um. I. Um. Might have started liking this guy. No big deal.”

 

The noodles Sehun had been inhaling made a waterfall cascade back into the bowl. “You what?”

 

Jongin nibbled dejectedly on his lower lip while protesting his case, “You have to understand, Sehun. He’s like, a demon. With cute powers. Demonic cute powers. And he used his demonic cute powers to call me a disaffected ass.”

 

“But you _are_ a disaffected ass.”

 

“That’s my point.”

 

Sehun put down his chopsticks, sighed with the fed-up, half-assed exasperation of all the tired, doting mothers in the world, and presented Jongin his palm. “I'm too tired to slap you. Bash your face up against my palm.”

 

Jongin, equally fed-up and exasperated with himself, rolled his eyes and obeyed.

 

“He wants me to help Chanyeol fight Junmyeon.”

 

Sehun would’ve looked less confused if he’d shaped himself into a question mark. “Jongin, did he have horns by any chance? And a pointy tail? With a pitchfork?”

 

“I’m serious, Sehun. He’s the real deal with Chanyeol.”

 

“Yeah, and you’re the real deal with Junmyeon,” Sehun said. “Here’s what, kid. My love for you is like this scar,” a jab at the scratch Jongin had given him the first time they fought, “Ugly, but permanent. Out of love, I’m telling you, if Junmyeon ever catches wind of you betraying him, he’s going to hook you by your nipples and sling you off the side of N Seoul Tower.”

 

Jongin considered the future of his nipples. He considered Kyungsoo. He considered not showing up. Junmyeon, too, had a reputation. If Chanyeol were a dark horse, Kim Junmyeon would be the godfather of the ground Chanyeol rampaged on. There have been mutinies against Junmyeon before, of course. But there have also been people spending months in the hospitals, people dying in mysterious car accidents, people disappearing into thin air. Jongin knew because he was responsible for about half of them. You pay your dues, after all, when the godfather’s taking care of you.

 

Problem was, Jongin was far too pretty to disappear. “He’s going to be hurt. He’s not--one of us, you know? He doesn’t know what Junmyeon does.”

 

Suspicious, Sehun squinted. “Do you?”

 

“Of course I do,” Jongin scoffed, barking out the desperate chuckle song of a man at the end of his wits.

 

“And you’re going anyway?”

 

“No I just--I don’t want him to go alone with the flakiest asshole on the planet, you see?”

 

“Yeah. I see. So do you want me to preheat the oven or do you want to dive right in?” Sehun asked, having totally thrown in the towel by this point, and returned to slicing up a piece of beef shank like he’s planning on putting it back together. Honestly, if Jongin were in his shoes, he would probably be doing the same.

 

“Don’t bother with the oven,” he said, slinging his jacket over his shoulder.

 

“Go easy on the sexy, Jongin,” Sehun hummed behind his back. “It makes you look kinda... creepy.”

 

Jongin scampered out the door before Sehun could see the crushed look on his face.

 

 

 

 

 

+++

 

 

 

 

 

When Kyungsoo opens his eyes again, there, two meters ahead of him is a familiar shock of blonde hair.

 

“Hey,” Attractive Puppy says cheerfully while shoving someone’s nose into his knee, “So I put some thought into it.”

 

Forget fluffy white wings and halos. Kyungsoo sees Jesus himself. Kyungsoo sees the Messiah, the Savior of mankind, all three Holy Spirit things and Buddha all lumped together. Behind him, Chanyeol spits a mouthful of blood into the pavement and flashes Jongin the most shit-eating grin, “I didn’t know you liked me _this_ much, Puppy.”

 

“Fuck off, Ferret Club,” Jongin bristles, flipping Chanyeol the bird as he knees someone else in the ribs, then kicks that same leg open to fracture someone else’s jaw. “No one likes you.”

 

Before Kyungsoo can come up with a smart enough follow-up, someone has gotten him into a judo throw. Next is a snap kick that Kyungsoo blocks and catches mid-air, a blind jab and a precise cross to left cheek. When he finds his center again, he’s lost both Jongin and Chanyeol in the crowd. It doesn’t matter anyway. There is more than enough on his own plate. Or more precisely, twelve bodies too many.

 

Kyungsoo picks up a spare baseball bat from the floor. One end is slick with something dark. Red paint, he tells himself, as he tightens his grip around the handle. Think pinatas.

 

Then he swings.

 

The rest of it is easy.

 

Until the end, Kyungsoo manages only glimpses of Jongin—in the middle of a flying kick, clocking someone in the eye, stepping on an unconscious body to send another sailing into the air—and, interestingly, nothing of Chanyeol.

 

It’s odd, because if anything, Chanyeol’s platinum blonde hair would be a shooting star against the concrete backdrop. Kyungsoo meets Jongin’s eyes and sees Jongin mouthing, “Chanyeol where?”

 

Casually batting a stranger’s head out of the way, Kyungsoo picks his way towards Jongin. “Have you seen him?”

 

Jongin shakes his head. There is blood dripping by the mouthfuls down his chin each time he moves his lips. “Hurt?”

 

The single word sucker-punches Kyungsoo right in the diaphragm. Time freezes. Kyungsoo sees nothing, hears nothing. A chord snaps in him, deep, and the next thing Kyungsoo is tearing through the crowd, face a scream mask, panic twisting his lungs shut. For a few hot seconds all Kyungsoo can do is claw blood out of everything in his way, everything that is not Chanyeol. There must be a splinter of silver in the shit lighting. With each second, the next sinks twice as heavy, as cold.

 

Then, out of nowhere, there is sound of gravel crushing. Kyungsoo snaps around on his heel, petrified, heart in his mouth--

 

Yep, there’s Chanyeol.

 

Totally peppy.

 

The baseball bat thuds like a rotten apple on the unconscious body Kyungsoo is standing on.

 

Five meters away, an asshole of biblical proportions and his grocery bag cheers from the inside of a taxi, “Fighting!!”

 

“WHAT THE FUCK,” Kyungsoo flares up, even though he’s far above the yelling business, wiping the mess of snot and tears off his face.

 

“I got bored,” Chanyeol says.

 

Jongin, barely propping himself up on one good leg, is more than ready to spike a baby out the nearest window. “Of course. You went on a coffee break, BECAUSE YOU WERE BORED.”

 

“But I bought you popsicles?” says Chanyeol, puppy-eyed and endlessly merry.

 

Kyungsoo takes a second to catch his breath. He can feel a violent rash of boils mushrooming angrily over his back as he picks up a baseball bat lolling over the ground and beelines for Chanyeol’s decorative flower vase of a skull. Except, somehow, the sky turns into floor midway.

 

Then the floor turns black and starts stinking of iodine.

 

 

 

 

 

+++

 

 

 

 

Chanyeol’s laugh is already ricocheting off the walls, two notches too high on the Richter scale, when Jongin wakes to the sight of the hospital ceiling. There’s an ache pervading through his body like the tight squeeze of cold weather, and an electric prickle crawling down his arm, collecting inside the lines of his palms. He hears the chatter and footsteps of people rushing down the corridors, and he crawls out of bed, the sheets damp and peeled on his skin.

 

The bed dividers beside him ripple from the air conditioner. The screen on the heart monitor says that it’s Thursday still, but the sun has long set.

 

He sits up, vaguely remembering hauling Kyungsoo’s unconscious body into the taxi—a throb swells down his knee—and tripping over the car seat before, judging by the crippling ache in his neck, passing out haphazardly into the back of the car. Or at the door. He can’t really tell.

 

“Where’s Jongin?” he hears Kyungsoo ask from across the divider.

 

Chanyeol responds, “Passed out from explosive diarrhea.”

 

Jongin fishes the plastic piss bowl out from beneath his bed and hurls it in the general direction of Chanyeol’s voice.  “You wanna fight, Park Crapyeol, you wanna fucking fight?”

 

Chanyeol pokes his head out from the crack between the dividers. There’s a nasty bruise smeared down the side of his face that Jongin doesn’t remember seeing, probably thanks to Demonically Cute Kyungsoo.

 

“Sure, maybe after you meet Kyungsoo’s aunt,” Chanyeol winks, and shoves the dividers over to unveil a little old lady with her brows pressed together. Jongin’s heart does a black-flip clean enough to put any Olympic gymnast to shame.

 

So it seems Kyungsoo's Satanic Stare is a family heirloom.

 

“What fight?” She asks, lips thin.

 

Jongin immediately deflates into a very perplexed and very inoffensive shell of a human being.

                                                             

“That is… fight… on the computer… with… virtual, fantasy, unreal characters,” Jongin gazes quickly at Kyungsoo on the bed at the end of the room, checking if he’s doing okay. He’s not. Kyungsoo looks like he’s two seconds away from hopscotching himself out the nearest window.

 

“In any case, the school must fix the stairs,” the lady says. “Your parents are paying good money to them. I don’t see why they’d overlook a safety hazard.”

 

Jongin nods as if his life depends on it. “Oh, yes, the darn things are so slippery and so sharp and there are so many of them—”

 

Kyungsoo does this little cut-throat motion with his thumb and Jongin zips right up. It’s been ages since he’s done such an impeccably fucked job at anything. From the corner of his eyes, Jongin sees Chanyeol sniggering soundlessly, and tallies it onto the mounting list of reasons to murder him in cold blood.

 

“And really, Chanyeol, why on earth is your hair that color?” She frowns.

 

On cue, Chanyeol turns spontaneously into a sad, confused puppy. “I was playing w-with the wrong shampoos?”

 

“Anyhow, I’ve got to go back to work. I brought your favorite game to pass the time,” she says, pulling a box out of her bag, “TV’s bad for you, all right?”

 

And this is how, as legends will go for the next decade, the three delinquent lords of Seoul end up in a coalition over a long engagement of Monopoly—which is not too out of character. There is ripping of IVs, strategic banging of leg casts, and thieving of bills aplenty.

 

Amidst all of this, Jongin secretly brushes his hand against Kyungsoo’s. Once. Twice. Then for a long, long time.

 

When he notices Chanyeol staring, Jongin goes red to the tips of his ears. And because he’s Park Chanyeol, and because he’s as unpredictable as he is cruel and scheming, he catches Jongin’s deer in the headlights gaze. With a lopsided smile squeezing one eye smaller, Chanyeol, to Jongin’s greatest dismay, winks.

 

There is actually no suitable analogy which would land within five light years of the momentous amount of shit this wink expresses, so we won’t try.

 

 

 

 

+++

 

 

 

 

By year’s end, the three of them begin to form something of a clique. Once in a while, when someone forgets their greetings to Kyungsoo, Jongin beats better sense into them. And then Chanyeol, forever the discord magnet, seemingly materializes from thin air to re-beat that sense into them. And, after all the beating has ended, Kyungsoo beats both Jongin and Chanyeol into apologizing to the poor kid because, in the end, Kyungsoo isn’t really a delinquent. He has no business smoking or wearing his expensive uniform like a rag or hanging out with the wrong crowd. In all honesty, Do Kyungsoo is an upright sort of guy. 

 

“Upright in the way that Beelzebub was upright?” Chanyeol likes to drawl, a self-purported blanket as he flops over Kyungsoo’s shoulder.

 

“No, in the way that decent citizens such as Shimura Shinpachi are upright,” is the default answer, to which Jongin’s response is usually, “Shinpachi in Elfen Lied AU?” which, all things considered, is a fair assessment. After that first time with Kyunggi, Kyungsoo realized fighting wasn’t so hard and that, more importantly, he was damned good at it. And he is growing increasingly good at it. Unsettlingly good.

 

So maybe the three of them are, like the moral quandary accompanying mint and chocolate and waffle cones, in the most bizarre and intuitively wrong of ways, meant to be. On occasion.

 

Mainly not, though.

 

“It’s gone again,” Jongin declares, instinctively snuggling up against Kyungsoo’s back. Sometimes Kim Jongin betrays all expectations and unveils himself as the puppy Chanyeol’s dubbed him: transparent, sensitive, and in possession of a fairly sharp set of canines.

 

Chanyeol dodges Jongin’s side-eye with the expertise of a decorated veteran. “Hey, woofy, fetch,” he calls, carelessly tossing Jongin a crumpled bread wrapper.

 

“My bike. Have. You. Seen. It,” Jongin reiterates, practically jabbing the words into Chanyeol’s right cheek as he bats the wrapper away from his face.

 

“Have you checked up your ass, maybe?” Chanyeol literally turns his left cheek, fishing a piece of kimchi out of Jongin’s tray. Kyungsoo has to pull Jongin back with his body weight. “Besides, I stopped stealing your things a long time ago.”

 

“You’re currently stealing my radish, fucking Ferret Club,” Jongin yells, fighting out of Kyungsoo’s grip.

 

“You know what, Jongin?” Chanyeol beams, that same ear-to-ear beam that half makes Kyungsoo want to strangle him. “I only steal it because it’s yours.”

 

Kyungsoo groans. He’s seventeen years too grossly disenchanted to endure this shit. “Give Jongin his fucking radish back, shithead.”

 

Chanyeol puffs his cheeks in protest and caves as soon as he catches Kyungsoo’s expression clouding. “If that makes you happy, Brah,” he says, then licks the radish.

 

And flicks it right into Jongin’s soup.

 

A beat.

 

“HANG ON,” shouts Jongin, practically flying across the roof in an attempt to tackle Kyungsoo down from high kicking Park Chanyeol’s tragic squirrel impression off the roof. “HANG ON, HYUNG, HE’S GOING TO DIE IF YOU DO THAT.”

 

Despite all the peril he’s facing, Park Chanyeol has the audacity to whine, “Hey, how come I’m shithead and ferret club when Kyungsoo gets to be hyung? Shouldn’t he at least be Beelzebub hyung?”

 

Jongin doesn’t even bother holding Kyungsoo back anymore at this point.

 

 

 

 

+++

 

 

 

 

“My Brah, wanna go clubbing tonight?” Chanyeol hollers, bright and strident as he pounces past the row of desks to Kyungsoo’s spot by the windowsill, as if his brah hadn’t just made mincemeat of him yesterday.

 

Kyungsoo flips to a new page in the physics textbook, takes a delicate sip of strawberry milk, and answers, blandly, “No.”

 

To contest this, Chanyeol tries aegyoing a broken violin variation of, “But Bra~a~ah,” that has Jongin gauging how close Kyungsoo is to punting him out into the courtyard below. If Jongin’s learned anything these few months, it’s that Park Chanyeol is a literal flight risk within a two meter radius of Kyungsoo’s scowl.

 

For whatever reason, however, Kyungsoo doesn’t have his scowl on today. He simply puts his milk down and highlights a few more lines in his text before responding, rather pensively, “Yes, Pa~a~anties?”

 

Jongin watches the red bean bun drop out of Chanyeol’s mouth and roll into a semi-circle around Kyungsoo’s feet. His attention flicks briefly to Kyungsoo, who is surreptitiously checking for Chanyeol’s reaction from behind his textbook, shoulders trembling silently as the corners of his mouth twitches up. Then back at Chanyeol, who is rooted to the ground, ice solid. Then Kyungsoo.

 

And here’s the thing. Jongin doesn’t mean to be in love. Given a choice, he would never choose to fall in love. Love--the kind of love he envisions for himself--is a pointless and lonely path to pointlessness and loneliness. It just isn’t the sort of thing Jongin has the patience to deal with.

 

But then there is Kyungsoo sitting inches before him, grinning ear to ear, the sun catching like a crack of molten lava in his eyes, and Jongin forgets all about love and loneliness. For a few, hazy seconds, everything in the universe, everything from the chipped ding of the lunch bell to the crinkled orange Aspen leaf fluttering in from the outside, disappears behind Kyungsoo. All that is left is Kyungsoo. 

 

Just Kyungsoo, with his heart-shaped mouth and pearly laughter, sinking into the filmy white voile of sunlight, like the beginning of a _happily ever after_.

 

 

 

  

+++

 

 

 

 

 

“When god closes a door he opens a window. Except guess what, dickhead? You can't fly. So what’cha gundo with an open window?” Chanyeol titters, falling naturally in step beside Jongin as if Jongin hasn’t spent the last ten minutes speed walking out of his trajectory.

 

“Throw you out of it?” suggests Jongin.

 

Chanyeol side-eyes him, stone cold. “Say that again,” he says, in a voice you’d never catch him with around Kyungsoo. His true voice. See, Park Chanyeol was never the complicated sort of character Kyungsoo made him out to be. Someone carrying a name synonymous with power can’t also possess the kind of dichotomy Kyungsoo assumed in him. Never could. The sort of double-exposed existence Kyungsoo envisioned is merely a wolf in sheep’s clothing, blue blooded, without a quantum of empathy in the bone arena of his skull.

 

What mental hang-up has got a wolf caught in Kyungsoo’s affairs though, Jongin can’t begin to fathom.

 

“What do you want, Ferret Club?”

 

Tucking away the hostile edge in his voice, Chanyeol declares, “I know you like Kyungsoo.”

 

“That’s none of your business,” Jongin says.

 

“It kind of is. Kyungsoo’s my favorite friend.”

 

“He’s your _only_ friend,” Jongin says, “and only because he doesn’t know what an ulcerous cumstain you are. Yet.”

 

“Well, obviously,” Chanyeol agrees without delay.

 

“What then, are you here to negotiate? Or are you here to wrap up your revenge game? Junmyeon wasn’t enough?”

 

“What revenge game? I wasn’t notified of one.”

 

“I don’t know, I tend to count dropping bricks as revenge--but maybe I’m the one who’s out of the loop.”

 

The hard look in Chanyeol’s eye falters a little. Then he reaches over and ruffles Jongin’s hair, as if he were so pleasantly surprised. “Aww, all right. You win. Want a belly rub? Bone? Frisbee?”

 

“Are you trying to start shit with me?”

 

“Nah. We’re friends, aren’t we?”

 

Jongin stares at Chanyeol for a long minute. “Chanyeol. I don’t like you. I can’t begin to give a flying fuck about you. But considering our mutual friend, here’s a piece of advice. Personality isn’t a shirt that you can throw on whenever the old one starts to smell. You can like hyung all you want, but he’s never going to like you back. He doesn’t even know who the fuck you really are.”

 

As Jongin turns to leave, Chanyeol holds him down, an iron grip over his shoulder. It’s easy for Jongin to forget how strong Chanyeol is after all this time with Kyungsoo, but the moment Chanyeol yanks Jongin into step, the reminder is a hard-knuckled punch to the temple. Chanyeol could, can, would, will kill him in a heartbeat.

 

“Shit, are you worried about me? Isn't that sweet," Chanyeol says, candid, "Don’t worry, I don’t feel like fighting you," the words lingering sharp and sour midair, like bad rum. Jongin remembers this inflection. Two summers ago, it tipped Jongin over the rooftop railing and dug deep down past flesh and fear and said, _danger feels good._

 

_Danger keeps you alive._

 

“What” Jongin responds, gaze levelled flatly ahead, tensed, about to uncoil into an uppercut, “is that supposed to mean?”

 

“It just means I don’t like fighting a losing battle. Especially not against a friend, you know?” Chanyeol says from behind him. His voice is unexpectedly soft and weightless, each word swallowed by the swell of chatter from the open classroom beside them. The last time Jongin heard him like this, Chanyeol was cornered and broken at the end of a small alley threading into Cheongdam. He said, just before Junmyeon had Jongin slit his ankle, “I didn’t know puppies grew up so fast.”

 

By the time Jongin thinks to ask, Chanyeol is gone.

 

And he doesn’t know this, not yet, but ten years in hindsight, this will be one of the last times Chanyeol ever tries to be honest with him. It will also be one of the first times Jongin lets him down.


End file.
